The actual taste of freedom in a democratic country like India can be easily taken for granted. But for someone who has been waiting for it since 1959, freedom was a luxury. This is not a story of a person but of lakhs of Tibetans who had to unwillingly leave their motherland and take refuge in India due to the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Today the forced occupancy from the Chinese side is the same as it was half a century ago. But a decent-sized community of Tibetians numbering around seventy thousand who were lucky enough to escape the Chinese military are raising their dissent in an organized manner in form of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) in India. In the 21st century, there are incidents where people escaped to India or Nepal, gambling their life for freedom by hiding from the Chinese army at the border through the rough Himalayan terrain. Such stories of escape tell us about the state of repression and lack of freedom to oppose the Chinese state in Tibet.
The teaching of Gautam Buddha is considered across the globe to free a mind from the shackles of conflicts and sorrow. Buddhism awakes each and every human on this planet to claim their natural right to live freely, which is also reflected in Buddha’s sermon that “freedom is the only condition of Happiness.”
All around the world, people in landlocked countries surrounded by countries from all sides are left in a condition where the freedom to move is strangled by borders. This often leads to war-like situations leading to bigger scars on humanity. But Tibetans are special as they are still holding the core meaning of Buddhism. They believe in the virtue that conflict is futile and things can be resolved through peaceful communication only.
India is a land where such a great religion by Gautam Buddha germinated, but it, unfortunately, was depleted with time because of the disenchantment of the Indians. It becomes a thing of great honour to secure again the truth of life (The Four Noble Truths) which Tibetans have held for more than a thousand years with care and passion for humanity under the guidance of his holiness The Dalai Lama.
Again it comes to an individual who lives in a free democratic country to have a passion for others who were evicted from their soil because they just wanted to live with freedom. They wanted freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Here it becomes very important to call a spade a spade and acknowledge the misdeeds of China. Because the people of Tibet are being exploited by China and its policies just because of their virtue and religiosity, it’s high time to secure the Tibetans and flourishes their beautiful minds in a superficial world marred by capitalism. It can be done by creating a discourse that calls out the injustice and imposition of ideology in the name of liberation happening with the people of Tibet in China and letting the people of Tibet live the way they want to live.